Over the past year, my wife and I have both begun practicing magic in the house. We follow different paths and have different objectives. My work is very light stuff tuned toward personal healing. Things went sideways for me a while back and I've been in recovery mode. New-agers might call it Light Work.

I've made a few petitions to this god or that, performed some dedications and adorations, and (until recently) regularly performed some real Golden Dawn 101 exercises as well as having become pretty familiar with tarot. So nothing major. My wife follows a more traditional wiccan path and works with candles and prepares various charms.

That said, I suspect - and I may be way off here - that performing this work more or less throws up a spiritual beacon that beings "out there" can sense or see and it draws them near. Kind of like in Poltergeist when Tangina explains why the spirits were drawn to Carol Ann.

Context: My son is five. And yes, I realize that little kids say fucked up stuff all the time but my son says a lot of fucked up stuff. Things he absolutely could not know. Past-life type stuff. Things that happened to my wife and I way before he was even born. Laurie Cabot informed my wife that he's psychic as hell and I'm inclined to believe her because of some of the things that come out of his mouth. He recently suffered a pretty significant health shock. He was hospitalized for over a week and we've been on edge about his health ever since. I'm in no way implying that evil spirits somehow caused his problems. I'm not that crazy. But the two of us have both done some magical support work to help him stay healthy while we follow through with the medical treatment prescribed to us by some of the best neurological doctors in the country.

Things recently got weird, though. For the first time since he was discharged from the hospital he suffered a very specific kind of health setback. There are plenty of rational explanations for why this happened but its occurrence coincides with some strange stuff happening around the house. Gonzo weirdness has happened in the past when the two of us get on a ritual working kick. A black bird appeared in my toilet one morning after the two of us did a number of rituals to help me find a new job. This bird finding its way from the roof to the toilet through my plumbing is about as unlikely as this thing flying into the house unseen and landing there. So I tend to draw a lot of connections when we perform works around the house and crazy shit happens like astral castoff.

A little background.

First: He's been telling us for a little while that his "other dad" comes to his window at night and watches him sleep. We ask him to describe him and we get a lot of bonkers five-year-old descriptors that end up sounding like Slenderman. We assume that by this point in the conversation, his attention has wandered and he's tired of talking about it and that what he's trying to tell us is not actually Slenderman but just a wild imagination.

Second: My wife recently made a charm, a bag containing some stones, herbs, and sigils intended to aid in the healing. This disappeared. No one but her knew that it was there. She looked for it and it was gone. It turned up later but under strange circumstances. It was found out in the open in an obvious spot that we had absolutely, positively, 100% checked before. There was no way that we could have missed it while searching and yet there it was.

Third: There has also been a lot of bad energy in the house. A lot of fighting about nothing in particular. Just bad attitudes toward one another.

As a precaution, I performed the LBRP in his room and used burning white sage as a wand. I also passed it over with a selenite wand. My wife prepared a new charm and just in case, I drew the Tetragrammaton on a black card in gold ink and left it on the window sill with a short prayer to the Archangels to guard the room.

Am I just a crazy person seeing connections where there are none? Is it possible that we've drawn unwelcome energies/spirits/beings to the house by doing what we do? The two of us invoke and banish when we do our work but who really knows if that's even doing what it's supposed to do for us? If any of you have any resources for detecting these spirits and warding them, I'd appreciate the insight.